In the Artist's Garden

JANUARY

New Year’s Eve

JOACHIM, the Jewish doctor from the Berlin synagogue, kindly drives me to the Midnight, and is transfixed by Wormingford Church, a medieval stone lantern whose fretted brilliance glitters over the parked cars.

Back at the old farmhouse, his Hanukkah candles will waver in the window as part of the Festival of Lights, which celebrates the rededication of the Temple by Judas Maccabaeus in 165 BC. Every morning, Joachim goes up to his room and prays for one hour, facing east. Prayer is an art that has to be practised. ‘Let us pray,’ I quietly invite the congregation. I read wonderful words.

Now, on New Year’s Eve, the guests gone, I find a pearl of candle wax on the windowsill, and leave it there. Jews would seem to be more obedient to Christ’s prayer-rules than his own followers. This is how Canon Andrew Linzey sums up these rules, in his little book The Sayings of Jesus. I often read them, and if I obey them in some measure that falls short of Joachim’s whole hour of daily prayer, it is because my writer’s mind tends to fly about, alighting on this and that, like one of my August dragonflies from the pond. Anyway, this is what Andrew says.

‘Jesus gives little advice about prayer except that it should be unhypocritical, devoid of empty phrases, and preferably done in secret’ (Matthew 6.1−8; Mark 12.38, 40). The public prayers and self-regarding rituals of the scribes and Pharisees are treated with scorn (Matthew 6.16−18). The prayer recommended by Jesus is simple and almost entirely petitionary in character (Matthew 6.9−13). His own prayer takes place before or after public ministry; he withdraws to pray and almost always prays alone. In John’s Gospel, he prays that his disciples may be kept in the truth, protected from evil, and ‘may all be one … so that the world may believe’.

Prayer, for Teilhard de Chardin, was ‘to lose oneself in the unfathomable’ − he was talking of adoration. For George Herbert, it was the best kind of conversation he could find on earth. Sickly, tramping to Salisbury Cathedral through the water-meadows, or mounted on his horse on the heights of Wiltshire, he would pray, or rather talk:

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength;

Such a Light as shows a Feast,

Such a Feast as mends in length,

Such a Strength as makes his guest.

Having broken through prayer into conversation with Christ, Herbert was already half in heaven − as slow-dying people often are − and he could not thank prayer enough for giving him such carefree access. So he wrote his happy extravaganza, which is a kind of Jacobean court eulogy addressed to the highest favour that can be awarded to a subject.

Witty, over the top, bursting with gratitude for its giving him such divine access to ‘my Friend’, he can be playful and profound all at once. ‘Of what an easie quick Access, My blessed Lord art thou!’ And then − the famous fun. What is prayer?

It is:

Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,

The land of spices; something understood.

The Akenfield Chair

A SEPIA, half-lit day. Wild duck fly over, squawking and honking. I am desultory: reading a bit of this, writing a bit of that. I could have gardened, I tell myself. The white cat is a blur against the window.

On Sunday, Christ is being presented at the Temple. He is 40 days old. They used to call it ‘the Meeting’, i.e. of the child with aged Simeon. They used to sing Lumen ad revelationem. Not much lumen on the ancient farm at this moment, but always plenty of revelation.

A friend has brought me the Akenfield chair, a mighty piece of furniture, lugging it through the wet garden. It is made of various woods from the trees where I used to live. Tim made it, and Jason set it down on the brick floor, where it at once became part of the old house. It is pale and heavy, and very hard. Could it bear a cushion? Its puritan beauty might flinch from such indulgence.

Jason returns to his old farmhouse, where he is a wonderful drawer of animals. Portraits of his ewes and cows look down on us in the pub. Furniture-makers used to be called joiners. I must not place the new chair near a radiator, or else what Tim has joined together will come apart.

I observe it lovingly after he has driven away, thinking of how it will outlive me, how it will fade and become worn, how a woman will call her husband to move it. It has a small drawer at the back in which I have put a card which says: ‘Tim Whiting made me, 2014.’

The Suffolk poet Robert Bloomfield honoured his gate-legged table with a poem. I see him bent over it, pushing his pen. He is the first writer I ever wrote about – this when I was 15. His famous work was The Farmer’s Boy, a Georgian idyll, a blissful view of life on the land, shorn of its hardships. He received a fortune for it, but died penniless.

His long poem became an agricultural party-piece. Young men would stand up in the pub and spout it by the yard. Or sing it. There were singing pubs and non-singing pubs. Vaughan Williams, collecting folk songs before the First World War, asked a young man to sing him a song so that he could write it down, but they were both thrown out of the bar by the landlord because it wasn’t a singing pub.

Now and then, I take a non-singing funeral. ‘Immortal, Invisible’ I announced the other day. A full church, but hardly a sound. I could hardly say ‘Sing up!’ with the coffin in front of me.

Various reasons are given for these packed non-singing funerals. Some say that the abolition of school assemblies has produced a hymnless population. Gareth is doing his best, of course. But what a loss. No ‘Immortal, Invisible, God only wise’ – yet Nine Lessons and Carols only a month ago, and in full voice.

But tears. Such tears from those who had not expected to cry. Usually the mourners are worn out with hospitals and drugs, with the ferocity of loss. The practice of religion brings philosophy as well as faith. All these things fill the wide spaces of an old country church for a funeral. The congregation is perfectly sad. ‘And afterwards at the White Horse.’ And afterwards the expense –£10,000, they reckon.

But enough of these wintry thoughts. A woman mounts the Temple steps. She is holding a child.

Twelfth Night

LONG ago, walking home, I was tempted to visit the poet Edward FitzGerald’s grave on a winter’s afternoon, just when the light was ‘going’, as we used to say. A young airman from the USAAF base with a little son in his arms was fumbling his way into the church. ‘Where is the light?’ he asked. Memorials glimmered all around. Light was taking its daily absence.

Since it is Twelfth Night, I take down the holly. Log fires have dulled its gloss. Crisped to a turn, it hisses from the beams to the bricks. The white cat has done for the Christmas cards. No sooner do I stand them up than she mows them down, believing this to be her duty.

I shove crushed wrapping-paper into a sack unceremoniously, empty ashes, and remove wizened apples, when, without warning, an Epiphany sun blazes in, making the ancient interior look trashy and in need of a good putting-to-rights. But, as children, we took down the paper chains and folded up the paper bells with sadness. We watched the snowman drip into nothing, and witnessed his dying. Everything was different then, as it was bound to be.

The farmhouse was in ‘full Christmas’ when William Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night to entertain King James at Whitehall. Food-wise, what could be salted away was preserved for the bitter months ahead. The winter’s cold could be terrible. You had to clutch at health for all you were worth. You could become low.

‘Keep good fires,’ the Revd Sydney Smith advised a depressed friend. ‘Winter wild, and winter drear. Surely wintertime is here,’ we sang in the village school. But in church we sang ‘Brightest and best of the sons of the morning’. Reginald Heber wrote this entrancing Epiphany hymn after discovering the Olney Hymns. He was so youthful, and, alas, so vulnerable to the destructive Indian heat. He listened to his hymn being sung in a Raj church below the Himalayas. It is exotic, and a far cry from Cowper’s pleading ‘Heal us, Emmanuel’.

Many old country people called Twelfth Night ‘the real Christmas’. It was also a trickster time, when boys became girls and bonfires from the old gods challenged the light of Christ. When ice and snow made it impossible to work, play took over. See a typical Dutch winterscape: as it is far colder inside, everyone is outside, skating, running, drinking, shouting. In freezing Victorian classrooms, the children would be told to stand up and ‘beat your arms’ to get the circulation going. One reason for our present post-Twelfth Night aches is that our blood barely circulates. Families dine on sofas, not at tables. But then the Three Kings probably dined on a carpet.

I could pick a bunch of primroses. Not that I will; for their open presence near the house must not be disturbed. But here they are, about a dozen of them, in the Epiphany sunshine, forerunners of thousands. The sodden oak leaves of the rains are dry and conversational. The sky is a goldmine. Lots of mud about. The church smells of pine needles and wax, and damp uncollected cards. I am to lay at Christ’s feet my ‘burden of carefulness’. I know exactly what the writer is getting at. So should we all.

George Herbert on the BBC

IT IS one of those not uncommon April-in-January mornings. Cirrus clouds rinsed with gold, animals wearing haloes – which they should, of course. The white cat, spread out on a radiator below the window, like a Roman at dinner, invites the winter sun to warm her. Birds idle above.

A long time ago, standing in the school playground and looking up, I heard a little boy say: ‘They don’t know it’s Thursday.’ Now and then, I don’t know it’s the 14th, or whatever. Someone knocks and says: ‘You are expecting me, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes, yes, of course, come in.’ I reach for the coffee/tea.

Jason has brought the Akenfield chair, a handsome descendant of the Arts and Crafts movement. It takes up its position in the ancient room with aplomb. I sit in it, and am at once enthroned. Tim, the wonderful craftsman, has made it out of oak, and maybe fruit woods. I must ask him. I sit in it apologetically, like the unworthy inheritor of a crown. It had pride of place at the Alde Festival.

The River Alde flows vaguely towards the Aldeburgh marshes, and thus to the North Sea. I lived by it when I was young. Now I live by the Stour, and in fine company: Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable. Slightly in flood, it glitters through my bedroom window.

When I was young, it poured through the low-lying cottages at Bures, just down the road. No electrics and fitted carpets in those days; so the wooden furniture was hauled up the narrow stairs until the water went down, and was swept out. Seeing today’s flood victims in Gloucestershire, my heart goes out to them. Water right up to the telly, boats outside, belated insurance, no dove to announce God’s forgiveness.

Constable loved rainbows. He painted one above Stoke by Nayland a few miles from here – knew how to merge the seven colours, all in their prismatic order. There could be a rainbow today, I think.

The Epiphany continues another showing. Another ‘Brightest and best of the sons of the morning’, among which count me. I’m not very bright in the evenings. ‘Wake up, that boy at the back there!’ Fragments of old protests try to stir me into action. What a hope.

On Sunday mornings, before Meriel or Mike arrives to drive me to church, I listen to the radio service, unreasonably disappointed by the thin singing, longing for that glorious full congregational sound. A priest overcomes all the techniques of broadcasting with her prayerfulness. It is very beautiful. I read George Herbert on this programme, and my friend Canon Judy Rees officiated.

I was with my friend Vikram Seth, a Hindu who comes to evensong. It was at Bemerton, near Salisbury, where Herbert was rector for a little more than two years – and changed the face of the Church of England. Should you go there, you will hear the bell that he tolled, and open the door that he opened – and not only to his parish church, but to aspects of believing which remain transforming. He was tall, young, and ill. Coughing, singing to his lute. Writing poems that no one knew about. Vikram Seth has absorbed them, even continued them.

At the Epiphany, we continue in the light. What would we see without it?

The Enlightened One

KEITH the builder works on the old farmhouse with a kind of inherited understanding of its materials and structure. A lath-and-plaster wall is taken back to its fundamentals. Anything later than, say, 1660 is swept away by what seems to me a hand that itself is contemporaneous with this date. But I do not enquire. I watch. His ‘history’ and my history are unable to speak to each other.

Dust of